I’ve realized recently that despite everything we analysts do and say about enterprise software company strategies, new products and technologies, trends, and all the other coins of the analyst realm, what matters most is how the sales force sells. If the field sales force can’t get in front of the right influencer at the right time with the right mix of product and strategy, then every analysis, recommendation, critique and consulting gig geared towards fine tuning go-to-market strategies quickly goes to hell in a hand basket. The bottom line is no go-to-market strategy is so perfect that it can’t die an ignominious death in the field.

It’s clear that the entire enterprise software market is at an inflection point when it comes to its customers. Depending on making quota by leveraging the good will from years of customer/vendor “partnership” isn’t going to cut it. While many deals are still done based on long-established relationships, the growing number of influencers and the complexity of the interoperability of new products and business processes means that counting on the old “nobody got fired for buying (insert your company here)” strategy is a quick road to the loss column.

These thoughts are coming to mind as the new year begins, and, the ritual of field kickoff meetings follows suit. Up in a week is SAP’s Field Kick-off Meeting (FKOM), and it’s a given that SAP’s massive sales force will have one of the biggest challenges in the industry. Not just because of the innovations that SAP is bringing to the market – which are myriad and overwhelming for those us who try to follow them, much less for a sales exec trying to translate them into something a customer is willing to pay for – but because these innovations are opening up new competitive challenges as they attempt to open up new markets for SAP and its partners.

Below is a letter to SAP’s FKOM attendees on the eve of the event, highlighting the things I think might make a difference in the coming year. It’s in two parts – I’m posting part I today, and will follow with part II in two more days. While it’s addressed to SAP, I believe the suggestions below apply to every enterprise software salesforce in the business. Enterprise software is changing, mostly for the better, and sales execution needs to change with it, or else.

Dear SAP Field,

This is the year in which the pressure is all on you – once again. SAP is coming to market with an unprecedented collection of products, strategies, services, and technology, and all these initiatives will either live or die in your hands. You’re going to be expected to be smarter, more strategic, better able to sell solutions, more attuned to the business user, and willing to make your life – and bonuses – more complex by getting SAP customers to adopt a growing portfolio of subscription-priced cloud services.

You’re supposed to be better at vertical selling, more attuned to bringing partner products into the mix, and ready to prove the value of massive improvements in software delivery, life-cycle management, training, and development. And you’ll need to know when to offer HANA Enterprise Cloud, HANA Cloud Platform, ARIBA’s business networks, Jam’s social collaboration, new user experiences like Fiori, specialized applications like Commodity Management as well as new initiatives like Smart Business.

You’re also going to have to know when to bring in SAP Services, when to suggest a Design Thinking workshop, when to cede the high ground to your big SI partners, when to send a deal downstream to a mid-market partner. You’ll need to know what the opportunities are in mobile, how to differentiate between a Sybase ASE, IQ, and SAP HANA sale. And while you do so you’ll need to be fending off the strategic incursions of Oracle, Workday, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, IBM, and a never-ending armada of erstwhile competitors looking to invade your shores and take away your hard-earned market share.

If you think this is hard – then you’re halfway there. And if you think this is impossible, then you’re actually showing signs of sanity: Rest assured, selling enterprise software was never a sane, rational process even in the best of times. But more importantly, with SAP’s senior management exhorting you to glory – and an ever-higher sales quota – you’re probably wondering how you’ll ever pull any of this off.

So, with FKOM looming and a new race to Q4 starting up, permit me to offer some suggestions gleaned from my own attempts at rationalizing what SAP is doing and aligning it with what customers are looking for. You may not like what I have to offer, and it’s possible that your bosses might not like it either: I’m a believer that targeting your quota first and your customers’ long term interests second may be good for the quarter but bad for everything else. Regardless, I think we can agree that selling this vast array of products and services as checklist items on a price list isn’t going to get you, or SAP, where you want to be by this time next year.

Sell Success, Not Licenses: If you do one thing to change how you interact with customers, it should be around selling success. Overselling and under-delivering are the unfortunate legacies of the enterprise software market, and all too many deals gone-bad are effectively the result of a salesperson promising whatever it took to get the deal done. It’s true that not every deal that goes bad is oversold – there may have been some overselling in the Avon deal, but fundamentally that deal went south because the global SI on the project ran it into the ground. But if you’re only in a sale to make your quota, in my opinion you’re doing everyone a disservice.

This of course means that your bosses have to give you the air cover to walk away from a deal or from plumping it up unnecessarily. If you’re going to be a good guy or gal, and do what’s right for the customer to the possible detriment of your quota, you should be able to do so without being stigmatized for not overselling. It ain’t going to be easy – ideally this new attitude would move all the way up the food chain to the board, and would be something that the investors who demand killer quarters regardless of who dies in the attempt would adopt as well. But regardless of who’s on board, selling success should be your job number one.

Sell Your Own Implementation Services, Not Your Partners’: Okay, a lot of people, particularly your global SI partners, are going hate me for saying this. Deloitte won’t like it for sure, they’re still running for cover in the wake of the Avon fiasco (Ding dong, Deloitte – Josh calling. Anyone home?) But the fact remains that SAP Services may be the best choice for not only implementing the latest and greatest – all that HANA you’re supposed to sell, for example – as well as the best choice for ensuring customer success. SAP Services is getting pretty good at driving innovation based on SAP’s latest products, the RDS offerings are singularly successful at managing implementation costs and timetables, and they definitely care a lot more about preserving SAP’s brand reputation than some global SI’s we’ve already discussed.

SAP’s Global SI partners have had too many incentives over the years to oversell the services side of a deal and jack the project cost and timetable way up, to the detriment of customer success. This is part of their DNA, and while some of them, particularly the boutiques, are getting the customer success religion, it’s hard not to be a global SI and still dream the oversell dream. So cut them out as much as possible.

Sell the Value of Training and Education: Top notch training and education is probably the single best guarantee of delivering long-term value to a customer, and SAP has some impressive, and impressively under-appreciated, education assets. This is an uphill battle worth trying to win with a customer base that has traditionally seen training and education as a waste of time and money. The ability of SAP to deliver training online, in-context, and tailored to a customer’s particular implementation is more than just nice to have – it’s really the only way to ensure that a shifting, mobile workforce will be able to optimize their use of the increasingly complex set of processes and technologies that SAP has to offer.

If you let your customers sign a deal without having some training and education in the mix from the get-go, you’re creating the first and most important precondition for project failure: lack of training. Another reason why you should be selling SAP’s training is that those global SI’s I’ve been picking on also have a sorry history of either not selling training and education or offering a mediocre product to those customers that opt in. SAP has something to offer that is top notch, and as concepts like strategic workforce planning and talent management become broadly accepted best practices, training and education services will be essential for making sure the right people are on the job at the right time.

Sell Lifecycle Management: Anyone in the marketing side of Solution Manager will tell you, I’m more in the loyal opposition than fanboy camp when it comes to Sol Man. This product set has been a mess for customers to understand and implement, and the wealth of partner products that perform different parts of the Sol Man functionality attest to the need for faster and easier ways to do some of the things Sol Man does. That being said, customer success can be best guaranteed by enabling a comprehensive lifecycle management function, and Sol Man has basically no equivalent in the market today. As SAP moves everything to the cloud, Sol Man’s benefits will become even easier to access – and in fact for pure cloud customers, much of what Sol Man does will be completely transparent. But while you’ve got your customers’ attention regarding success, sell them a little insurance too. If I were the SAP Board I’ve give your customers a discount on their maintenance if they fully implement Sol Man (ditto on that offer for training and education): nothing will help ensure success more than a fully implemented ALM strategy, whether it’s based only Sol Man or some combination of Sol Man and partner products.

Sell Interaction and Process Excellence , Not Mobile and Cloud: I know you’re going to have customers who say that they need a cloud or mobile strategy, and it’s going to be tempting to try to give them one by selling them some cloud or mobile software. But my experience is that the customers that ask for products in this manner today are either way behind the market or missing the opportunity to have a more inclusive, internal dialogue with their stakeholders about what really should matter to the customer: supporting world class stakeholder interaction and process excellence.

This isn’t about more mobile and more cloud: Moving the needle on your customers’ business processes should be a technology-agnostic quest that starts at the process and interaction level. Technology platform choices like cloud and its many sub-categories should be made in support of the process improvement goals, not as a pre-condition to process improvement. And supporting mobile today is like supporting alternating current – try to re-think a core process that doesn’t have a mobile component. So don’t lead with the obvious, lead with what really changes the game for the customer.

Monday, Sep 29, 2014

ARTICLE: It’s year four in the Charles Phillips era at Infor, and the more things change the more they remain the same. The changes are impressive – new functionality across a wide swath of its legacy product lines, a new release of Infor XI, its next generation suite, a focus on industry-specific clouds that is such a good idea that I expect it will attract copycats from all over the market, a dedicated data science consulting team, new capabilities for defining and delivering best practices in implementations – it’s a long list, and it all looks good.

Thursday, Jan 22, 2015

BLOG POST: SAP’s annual sales kickoff meeting season, FKOM, is under way, with the North American and European versions kicking off this week. FKOM is where the new strategies, products, alliances, and services are all pressure-tested on that thin, white-shirted line of sales people who have the unenviable job of syncing the year’s marketing strategy with the desperate desires of SAP’s customers, and then getting them to actually write a check. It’s a mating ritual that is equal parts science and art, and its quarterly execution is one of the software industry’s greatest and most mystical natural wonders.

Wednesday, Jan 28, 2015

BLOG POST: While the biggest selling point of Windows 10 – a single code base for building apps that run across every possible device – was definitely part of the messaging of the event, the evidence that Microsoft knows what this really means for the enterprise, or even what makes enterprise users tick, was missing in action. Again.

Wednesday, Feb 11, 2015

BLOG POST: There’s a lot to unpack from SAP’s S4 HANA announcement of last week, but if I could only highlight the essence of what the announcement means for SAP and its customers, it’s this: SAP needs to make sure every customer understands how the versions of SAP they are running today will lead them to S4 HANA, in what time frame and at what cost.

Thursday, Feb 12, 2015

Wednesday, Mar 4, 2015

BLOG POST: Back in the early stages of the SaaS market, so many months ago, it seemed obvious that the SaaS market would one day undergo a major transformation as the easy wins based on taking on-premise capabilities and flipping them to the cloud – pretty much the business model of Salesforce.com in the early days– gave way to an era of greater complexity and value. At one time it was the value-added cloud capabilities of business networks and the like that were supposed to lead the SaaS world to the promised land by using the cloud to conduct business in ways that simply hadn’t been possible in the on-premise world.
Wrong. So far, anyway.

Monday, Jun 1, 2015

ARTICLE: Test driving the HoloLens, Microsoft’s soon-to-be released augmented reality headset, it’s easy to forget the challenges facing Satya Nadella as his first year on the job starts to take shape.

Tuesday, Sep 8, 2015

ARTICLE: At a press/analyst meeting last spring, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was asked whether he had any plans to build out an Amazon AWS-like capability to complement the rest of his cloud strategy. His scoffing reply was right on the money. Competing with AWS and other commodity-level cloud services was “a race to the bottom,” Benioff replied. Case closed.

Tuesday, Oct 13, 2015

ARTICLE: Microsoft’s five-year Windows Phone freefall is living, or dying, proof that there are only so many second chances in tech, even for the kings of second chances, and it’s finally time to throw in the towel on another great phone OS that never lived up to its potential. (ah, Palm OS, we hardly knew ya too.)

Thursday, Nov 12, 2015

ARTICLE: You’ve got to love a company that brags at its user conference that its motto is Learn, Laugh, Share, Connect. Don’t hear that too often. What you also don’t see very often is the other characteristic that makes the company in question, Kinaxis, unique: it’s a highly profitable, cloud-only company. And when I say profitable, I mean profitable, as in a net profit margin of 16% of its $23.8 million in revenue last quarter.

Wednesday, Jan 13, 2016

ARTICLE: Salesforce.com kicked off the analyst season with the first analyst summit of the year, and aside from inciting back-to-school analogies from an overly-relaxed group of analysts, some clear wins and opportunities, and a few issues, emerged that will both set the bar for the competition and keep Salesforce execs from entertaining any notions of complacency.

Wednesday, Feb 17, 2016

ARTICLE: Every vendor, whether old guard freshening up for the cloud, or new guard playing defense against the dark arts, has a cloud platform strategy with two purported goals: offer value to customers and confer an easy way for partners to make up for the lost revenue implicit in the cloud’s ability to sop up a lot of low-hanging fruit previously left for partners to pick.

Monday, Apr 4, 2016

ARTICLE: As the enterprise software market embraces the concept of digital transformation with typical reckless, feckless abandon, it’s interesting to see how one of the most transformative concepts – business networks – is evolving. What’s clear from a look at two of the most well thought-out strategies, those of Infor (via its GT Nexus acquisition) and SAP (via its Ariba acquisition), is that there’s no shortage of merit to what these two companies are doing and planning.

Friday, Jun 3, 2016

BLOG POST: The first time I ever attended a user group meeting was way back at the dawn of my career, when I was managing a pioneering print-on-demand/desktop publishing system for a specialty publisher. I went to the meeting to find out if the vendor was ever going to fix the latest version of its software, which was basically dead-on-arrival. To my surprise, the CEO took to the stage, apologized profusely, begged forgiveness, promised to fix the problem or else, and otherwise completely humbled himself in front of his irate customers.

Sunday, Jun 5, 2016

BLOG POST: In case you don’t know the drill, SAP’s biggest challenge of all is to funnel everything that’s good and true and important to the company into CEO Bill McDermott’s keynote. The process is simple – start with a blank sheet, put some ideas on paper, and then watch as the jostling, politicking, and pitching begins to fill out Bill’s time on stage.

Wednesday, Jun 8, 2016

BLOG POST: It’s now standard operating procedure at virtually every conference I attend: the execs on stage are talking about a disrupted digital future and how they can enable it to an audience that’s pretty much focused on how their vendor can help them do a better job today: The future can wait.

Wednesday, Jun 15, 2016

BLOG POST: If someone were to write the “The Tech Event Manager’s Guide to Engaging a Millennial Audience”, a look at Salesforce.com’s recent TrailheaDX conference would be a great place to start. Similarly, if someone wanted to write the “Platform Vendors’ Guide to Building an Engaged Developer Audience”, that same TrailheaDX conference would also serve as an excellent model.

Wednesday, Jun 22, 2016

BLOG POST: Sometimes revolutions start with a shot heard round the world, and sometimes they start with a quiet nudge in a new direction. The latter form of revolution was nudged into being for SAP’s HR customers last April in the form of eight words uttered by Mike Ettling, the president of SAP SuccessFactors, during an analyst summit in San Francisco. Ettling’s eight words have been said before, but the fact that they come from a man who is re-writing what it means to be a cloud company, and thereby what it means for customers to consume cloud services, adds enormous gravitas to the moment.

Tuesday, Jun 28, 2016

BLOG POST: The opportunities for IoT innovation abound. The ability, for example, to optimize the angle of the blades of a wind turbine in real time, or identify and track the contents of a pallet of parts as it moves through the supply chain, will change the underlying operations of every industry and every individual in ways that are only now beginning to be understood.

Monday, Jul 11, 2016

BLOG POST: “Cybersecurity is a cat and mouse game where the mouse gets bigger and more ferocious by the minute,” stated Joshua Greenbaum, analyst, Enterprise Applications Consulting, in his discussion of the topics to be addressed at the upcoming Rock Stars of Cybersecurity Threats and Countermeasures, September 13, 2016, in Seattle. “Security threats can’t be minimized. That’s why companies of all sizes are running to the cloud.”

Tuesday, Oct 18, 2016

BLOG POST: All the attention on whether Russia or some other nation-state entity is trying to hack the election in November or how organized gangs are flooding PCs with ransomware has obscured that truth about where the real threat to our collective cybersecurity comes from: our employees.

Monday, Nov 28, 2016

BLOG POST: As the enterprise software market slowly morphs into the enterprise software and platform market, it’s become necessary to carefully define what it means to be a successful platform vendor. Importantly, that definition has nothing to do with technology – okay, maybe a little – but it does have a whole lot to do with people and perceptions.

Monday, Dec 12, 2016

BLOG POST: Cloud computing, the artist formerly known as SaaS, has always been a proving ground for dynamic leadership. The standard – brash, outspoken, ubiquitous, successful – was set once upon a time by Marc Benioff, and ever since it’s been easy to measure cloud leadership by what I call the Benioff Scale. On a Benioff Scale of 1-10, where 1 is Ginni (Ginni who?) Rometty of IBM, and 10 is Marc himself, measuring cloud leadership by how many Benioffs a particular leader generates is as good a method as any.

Tuesday, Jan 17, 2017

BLOG POST: SAP’s S/4 HANA has been called many things, but to characterize it as the future of SAP is far from hyperbole. SAP has minced no words in affirming that the path from R/2 to R/3 to ECC eventually leads to S/4 HANA. The question is not an “if”, but a “when.”
When, however, has been the tricky question – when will the customers sign on in droves, when will SAP put in the critical mass of the functionality customers need in S/4 in order for the transition to make sense, and when will S/4 become a significant revenue-maker for SAP?

Thursday, May 11, 2017

BLOG POST: Part of the fun and challenge of following SAP is that its present and future are defined by the intersection of its own peculiarities and the peculiarities of the markets it lives in. This interplay means that SAP, like many large software companies, isn’t just a single company with a single overarching strategy: it’s really many companies with many strategies. The trick for SAP is to make sure they overlap more than they contradict each other.

Friday, May 12, 2017

BLOG POST: We’re back, discoursing on the challenges SAP will face as platform proliferation and the shifting of the edge app issue into the hands of the LOB developer influences what vendor’s tools and platform will be used to power its customers’ digital transformations. Where we last left off, I was about to illustrate SAP’s dilemma with a true-to-life story.)

Friday, Jun 9, 2017

BLOG POST: There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about the differences between S/4 HANA On-premise/Private Cloud and S/4 HANA Public Cloud. And that confusion threatens to derail the growing momentum around the company’s flagship cloud products.

Friday, Aug 11, 2017

BLOG POST: Apparently my blog post last month accusing Microsoft of neglecting its Dynamics product line struck a nerve. The gist of the post was that Dynamics was falling into irrelevance as Microsoft seemed to focus on bigger and better things.

Sunday, Sep 24, 2017

BLOG POST: This is the year of hyping artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things (IoT). Any vendor with any vision, which is everyone, is blanketing customers and partners with pronouncements and keynotes that highlight an increasingly large roster of products, platforms, and technologies loosely organized under the AI/ML/IoT rubric. The result is that these acronyms and the products they represent are everywhere, singing, and dancing their way to our hearts.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

BLOGPOST: Can the Internet of Highly Insecure Things Be Trusted to Run the One True Network?
As the dust settles on the recent changes at SAP, and with SAPPHIRE looming large, it’s worth taking a look at what I think will be one of the most interesting, ambitious, and potentially lucrative bets SAP has made in a long time. The bet is on Ariba and its vision for a global, competitor-crushing, B2B network. At stake is nothing short of a major reconfiguration of the global economy, global trade, global service delivery, and pretty everything else that falls under the rubric of B2B commerce as we know it.

Monday, Sep 1, 2014

Monday, Sep 15, 2014

BLOGPOST: I’m heading to the SuccessFactors user conference, SuccessConnect, in Las Vegas this week and, as a prelude to the conference, here’s some of the questions I’m looking to have answered during the course of the conference.

Thursday, Sep 18, 2014

PODCAST: SuccessFactors’ user conference, SuccessConnect, has come and gone, and the four questions I posed in my previous post about the challenges facing SuccessFactors and SAP were largely answered. But, as in any good dialectic, one good answer is just the starting point for another good question….. I’ll start with the Workday question/answer in this post, and continue with answers to my other three questions in a subsequent post.

Tuesday, Sep 23, 2014

BLOGPOST: The fundamental problems plaguing Oracle won’t go away with Larry moving into an executive chairman role, this is more lipstick on a pig than a serious attempt to get the company back on course. The problem is that shuffling the deck chairs does nothing for dealing with the company’s three fundamental problems. Until these are addressed, I think it’s safe to assume there will be no turnaround any time soon.

Friday, Oct 10, 2014

BLOGPOST: The news that Meg Whitman is finally pulling the plug on the Sisyphian task of trying to resurrect HP has profound implications for the future of Oracle, and not just because the mess that Whitman was unable to unravel was an HP made functionally unmanageable by a previous HP CEO: Mark Hurd, now co-CEO of Oracle. I think Oracle has been on the leadership skids for a while, but Hurd’s track record at HP, the end-game of which is now being played out in the breakup of the once-vaunted tech leader, provides a good roadmap for how Oracle ends up on the chopping block like HP.

Friday, Oct 24, 2014

BLOGPOST: It’s hard to slog through mega-conferences like Dreamforce, and not just because 135,000 people are way too much for San Francisco and its Moscone Center to handle. The sheer girth of Salesforce.com is also a factor: the company has become an immensely complicated and multifaceted company, maybe too much so for a single conference. Regardless, Dreamforce reminds me of why I don’t see my favorite bands in a coliseum setting: The volume needed to fill a coliseum washes out the undertones and overtones that make music a rich and complex listening experience, instead leaving the listener to sort through a lot of random, washed out noise.

Thursday, Oct 30, 2014

BLOGPOST: There’s always a lot to say about Microsoft, and, like any big company, it’s usually a mix of good or bad. Having spent two days last week at the Microsoft Dynamics analyst event, I think that when it comes to the enterprise, most of what there is to say about Microsoft isn’t just good: Microsoft’s enterprise story just gets better and better, and while there are holes and issues abounding, the old maxim that Microsoft eventually gets it right was very much in evidence last week (with one notable, and important exception).

Tuesday, Nov 18, 2014

BLOGPOST: Hanging out with Kinaxis, the relatively small and always interesting supply chain vendor from Ottawa, Canada, never fails to be an eye-opening experience. It’s not just that I get to meet with a vendor and a loyal cadre of customers who are collectively pushing the envelope on all things supply chain, it’s that sometimes they’re pushing an envelope I hadn’t seen before in my peregrinations in the supply chain world.
This year’s Kinexions user conference was no different. What I heard from Kinaxis about taking Rapid Response, its in-memory supply chain planning product, further into the realm of collaboration by pushing users to self-identify their areas of responsibility represented an excellent strategic direction on the part of Kinaxis

Tuesday, Dec 2, 2014

PODCAST: There is perhaps no contemporary issue at the intersection of technology and public policy that is more contentious and conflicted than net neutrality. The issue itself has probably accounted for its own increase in Internet traffic over the last couple of years as opinions, jeremiads, official proclamations, and even HBO’s John Oliver, have weighed in on the issue.

Wednesday, Dec 10, 2014

BLOGPOST: I think it’s pretty fair to say that counting Microsoft out in a market it has made a commitment to is a classic rookie mistake that serves as the epitaph for too many forgotten companies. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again is a time-honored mantra in Redmond. And it’s pretty evident that Windows Phone is one of those areas where Microsoft has made big commitments – including but hardly limited to its $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia’s phone business – and where the company is on the record as committed to try try again.

Friday, Feb 13, 2015

BLOGPOST: So, smooth sailing for S/4 HANA?– Not likely, certainly nothing like the good old days when R/3 was the biggest and the baddest modern, client/server, enterprise software product on the market, marauding through the global economy like a rum-soaked buccaneer.

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